ICANN has given registries and registrars the ability to delay the cancellation of domain names owned by victims of Hurricane Maria and other similar natural disasters.

In a note to contracted parties, published by Blacknight boss Michele Neylon this weekend, Global Domains Division president Akram Atallah said:

registrars will be permitted to temporarily forebear from canceling domain registrations that were unable to be renewed as a result of the natural disaster.

Maria and other hurricanes caused widespread damage to infrastructure in the Caribbean earlier this year — not to mention the loss of life — making it difficult for many people to get online to renew their registrations.

ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement ties registrars to a fairly strict domain name renewal and expiration life-cycle, but there’s a carve out for certain specified “extenuating circumstances” such as bankruptcy or litigation.

Atallah’s note makes it clear that ICANN considers hurricane damage such a circumstance, so its contractual compliance department will not pursue registrars who fail to expire domains on time when the registrant has been affected by the disaster.

He added that perhaps it’s time for the ICANN community to come up with a standardized policy for handling such domains. There’s already been mailing list chatter of such an initiative.

ICANN is heading to Puerto Rico, which was quite badly hit by Maria, for its March 2018 public meeting.

While attendees have been assured that the infrastructure is in place for the meeting to go ahead, large parts of the island are reportedly still without power.

There have been no formal complaints of sexual harassment in the ICANN community since the organization introduced a zero tolerance policy back in March, according to the Ombudsman.

That’s even after the current media storm about such behavior, precipitated by the revelations about movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which has given men and women in many industries the confidence to level accusations against others.

“There have been no complaints of sexual harassment since the implementation of the Community Anti-Harassment Policy nor the uptake of [post-Weinstein] media coverage,” ICANN Ombudsman Herb Weye told DI in response to an inquiry today.

The anti-harassment policy was adopted in March, and there have been three full, in-person ICANN meetings since then.

Face-to-face meetings are of course where one would expect to see such incidents, if any were to occur.

The policy bans everything from groping to wolf-whistling to dirty jokes to repeated, unwanted requests for dates.

No complaints since March does not necessarily mean no incidents, of course.

One recent recommendation to reform the office of the Ombudsman (or Ombudsperson, or simply Ombuds, in recent ICANN documentation) is to ensure a gender-mixed staff to perhaps make it more likely for issues related to gender to be reported.

A recent, non-scientific survey of ICANN participants found that about a third of women had knowledge or experience of sexism in the community.

Weye said that most complaints about non-sexual “harassment” occur at social events where alcohol is involved. He said that ICANN participants should be discreet when discussing “sensitive” cultural issues in such contexts, lest they inadvertently offend those within earshot.

There is “no place for disrespect in ICANN’s multi-cultural diverse environment” he said.

Phil Corwin, the face of the Internet Commerce Association for over a decade, today quit to join Verisign’s legal team.

He’s now “policy counsel” at the .com giant, he said in a statement emailed to industry bloggers.

He’s also closed down the consulting company Virtualaw, resigned from ICANN’s Business Constituency and from his BC seat on the GNSO Council.

But he said he would continue as co-chair of two ICANN working groups — one looking at rights protection for intergovernmental organizations (which is kinda winding down anyway) and the other on general rights protection measures.

“I have no further statement at this time and shall not respond to questions,” Corwin concluded his email.

He’s been with ICA, which represents the interests of big domain investors, for 11 years.

As well as being an ICANN working group volunteer, he’s produced innumerable public comments and op-eds fighting for the interests of ICA members.

One of his major focuses over the years has been UDRP, which ICA believes should be more balanced towards registrant rights.

He’s also fought a losing battle against ICANN “imposing” the Uniform Rapid Suspension process on pre-2012 gTLDs, due to the fear that it one day may be forced upon Verisign’s .com and .net, where most domain investment is tied up.

The June 24-27 meeting, ICANN 65, will be hosted by the Mediterranean Federation of Internet Associations at the Palmeraie Resort in Marrakech. That’s the same venue as ICANN 55 in March 2016.

It’s a Policy Forum meeting, meaning it has an abridged agenda, an expected lower attendance, and a tighter focus on policy work than the other two annual meetings.

It will be sandwiched between the March meeting in Kobe, Japan and the November meeting in Montreal, Canada.

More pressingly, it now seems all but certain that ICANN is heading to Puerto Rico in March 2018 for ICANN 61, despite the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Maria in September.

During the public forum at ICANN 60 in Abu Dhabi last week, the customary spot where the next meeting’s hosts get five minutes to plug their city or nation was notably different.

Shots of landscapes, sunsets and cultural attractions were instead replaced by a series of government and local tourism officials encouraging ICANNers to visit. The message was basically: everything’s okay, it’s safe for you to come.

The convention center venue for ICANN 61 was so lightly damaged by Maria that it was actually used as the headquarters of the recovery effort immediately after the storm. You may have seen news footage of it when President Trump showed up.

ICANN said October 7 that it was monitoring the situation but that it still intended to have the March meeting in San Juan as planned.

The city would no doubt welcome the modest economic boost that a few thousand tech professionals and lawyers showing up for a week will provide.

ICANN may just be a matter of weeks away from giving applicants for the .mail, .corp and .home gTLDs an exit strategy from their four years in limbo.

Its board of directors on Thursday passed a resolution calling for staff to “provide options for the Board to consider to address the New gTLD Program applications for .CORP, .HOME, and .MAIL by the first available meeting of the Board following the ICANN60 meeting in Abu Dhabi”.

It’s possible this means the board could consider the matter before the end of the year.

A study showed that all three — .home and .corp in particular — already experience vast amounts of erroneous DNS traffic on a daily basis.

This is due to so-called “name collisions”, which come about when a newly delegated TLD is actually already in use on corporate or public networks.

Many companies use .corp and .mail already behind their firewalls, a practice sometimes historically encouraged by commercial technical documentation, and .home is known to be used by some ISPs in residential and business routers.

Both of these scenarios and others can lead to DNS queries spilling out onto the public internet, which could cause breakage or data leakage.

The solution for all new gTLDs delegated to date has been to wildcard the entire zone with the message “Your DNS needs immediate attention” for a period before registrations are accepted.

This has led to some new gTLDs with far less collision traffic seeing small but notable pockets of outrage when delegated — Google’s .prod (used by some as an internal shorthand for “production”) in 2014.

Studies to date have concentrated on the volume of error traffic to applied-for gTLDs, but last Thursday the ICANN board kicked off a study that will look at what the real-world impact of name collisions in .mail, .corp and .home could be.

It’s tasked the Security and Stability Advisory Committee with carrying out the study in conjunction with related groups such as the IETF.

But this is likely to take quite a long time, so the board also resolved to think up “options” for the 20 affected applications.

Could the applicants be offered a full refund, as opposed to the partial one they currently qualify for? Could there be some kind of deferment option, such as that offered to unsuccessful 2000-round applicants? Either seems possible.